Celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day

Each year on September 19 people around the world celebrate International Talk Like A Pirate Day. This year you can celebrate this fun day with a few of these fun activities. So, this September 19, put on your favorite pirate costume, learn to talk like a pirate and have a fun and silly day.

Creep Out your Friends With Scary Ghost Stories

Nothing is more classic than telling ghost stories around the campfire. But have you ever wondered how to tell a really spooky story? There are tricks to keeping any audience’s interest, whether you’re talking to kids or to your parents.

First, think through your story. Are you telling the tale of a murdered ghost who haunts a seaside town? A roaming madman who pursues travelers with an axe? How about a thump-thump-thumping limb, buried under the floorboards? If the story has some secrets to be revealed, such as the identity of the limb’s owner, decide in advance when you want to share the secret. It’s most effective to hold that kind of information back as long as you possibly can, so your listeners are on the edges of their seats.

This is called building tension, and you want to do it as much as you can. Set up your story by introducing the main characters and giving a little background if needed, such as the tale of the murder that leads up the ghostly haunting. If your audience is small, you might add in details that fit your listeners. For instance, if you little sister loves peppermint ice cream and cats, you could have one of the townspeople (maybe the one who will be haunted) also love peppermint ice cream and cats. That will help your sister feel a kinship with this character, so she’ll care more about what happens in the story. And it’ll be scarier! You can do the same thing with all your listeners, if you have enough characters.

This is called building tension, and you want to do it as much as you can. Set up your story by introducing the main characters and giving a little background if needed, such as the tale of the murder that leads up the ghostly haunting. If your audience is small, you might add in details that fit your listeners. For instance, if you little sister loves peppermint ice cream and cats, you could have one of the townspeople (maybe the one who will be haunted) also love peppermint ice cream and cats. That will help your sister feel a kinship with this character, so she’ll care more about what happens in the story. And it’ll be scarier! You can do the same thing with all your listeners, if you have enough characters.

Continue to build tension by posing questions you don’t answer. For instance, you might have the townspeople ask each other who could be haunting them? They don’t know the answer, and neither do your listeners. You do, but it’s best if you don’t tell—keep this a secret until your big reveal.

Use your voice to set the tempo and drama in your story. Because ghost stories are often told in the dark, your voice is a very powerful tool. You can, of course, get louder and quieter during the story. Speaking softly can be just as powerful as being loud, since it means your listeners have to lean in and strain to hear you. A classic technique is to get very quiet, almost whispering, as you lead up to something exciting—then suddenly let your voice boom! By the same token, you can set the pace of the story by speaking more quickly and more slowly. Speaking slowly sounds ominous and scary, where fast speaking is best for parts of the story that move fast, like times when your heroine is running away from a monster or when your hero is thinking fast, deciding what to do.

Now it’s time to try telling your own story. Here is a very rough framework you can use, but it’s up to you to fill in the details and make this interesting. Who are the characters exactly? What are their names? What do they do for a living? Do they have pets? Where do they live and what does the town look like, or their house? How will the story end? And most important of all, decide how you want to share the key details. A little at a time? All at once at the end? Try to pick the method that creates the most tension.

The Basic Story. A family moves into a house. They hear weird noises in the attic and in one of the rooms. Sometimes they hear a sound like a leg being dragged across the floor, or someone coughing and wheezing. They’re sure they’re haunted by ghosts. [Add your own haunting details.]

An old woman shows up and explains that long ago, a husband and wife lived in the house. They took in the local school teacher as a renter for the year. The wife thought the husband was falling in love with the school teacher, and she started to hate her husband. They argued all the time. After a few months, they hated each other so much, they wanted to kill each other.

One night, in a fit of rage, the husband grabs his axe and swings at his wife, ready to kill her. He plunges the axe into her heart. As she dies, he tries to say he’s sorry, but she just laughs. “Fair’s fair,” she cackles. “I’ve been poisoning you for weeks!” Sure enough, the man dies that very night of arsenic poisoning.

And the old woman who told this whole story? She’s the school teacher who started it all. Some people in town say she got the couple to kill each other on purpose so she could inherit their house. And now, some people say, she’s here to kill this family and take back the house that’s rightly hers….